and. i know. islamic militants threatened to carry out more terror attacks in retaliation for the french campaign in mali accusing paris of a crusade. the german coalition government felt an important task months ahead of the national parliamentary vote. christian democrats lose ground to the social democrats opposition in regional elections. and as israel prepares for its own parliamentary poll on tuesday we report on why many in the country are growing increasingly frustrated with the policies of the party that said to win the vote.

it's five pm here in moscow this is r t with me and you see now way our top story and the islamic terrorist cell allegedly responsible for the deadly siege in algeria says france is carrying out a crusader campaign in the region almost sixty hostages were killed after militants captured a remote gas plant in retaliation for the ongoing french intervention in neighboring mali where the islamists claimed they wanted to negotiate the release of their captives but the offer was turned down syrian military deciding to storm the facility causing a bloodbath more terror attacks have now been promised unless france ends its campaign in north africa so if the hostage takers were militants from libya where paris helped islamists topple the late colonel gadhafi would warned of an impending al-qaeda surge in the region parties probably boycott has more. of

a family. you want to peace. you wanted freedom you wanted economic progress france great britain europe will always stand by the libyan people. but a regional crisis probably wasn't what mr sarkozy anticipated when he was spearheading the military operation to topple moammar gadhafi although the former french president can't say that he hadn't been warned personally i play a significant role in establishing peace in those regions of africa should the situation in libya be unstable al qaeda will establish its rule bin laden will return and libya will be another afghanistan terrorists will flood to europe cut to paris and almost two years later mark is out these words could well be ringing in the areas of need what i saw was the successor francois hollande having just sent troops to mali france's new leader could well be learning that every action has

a reaction. so let's not only did the french intervention in libya not help the democratic process which is what they said they were after but it is fact if it opened up the floodgates for weapons stockpiles and fighters to leave the country and go south of the border. to mali where the recently deployed french military were reportedly stunned by the technologically advanced weapons that are in the hands of their adversaries nobody seems to think that perhaps organized come from somewhere other than mali it seems they came across the nearby libyan border libya is as i say central to all this problem because all the a lot of weapons have been produced by the collapse of the darfur region but also by the complete failure to establish any kind of real state you have essentially all talk rating in different parts of libya and you have across much of this hour. a situation where people have arguments for vengeance of extenso bribery and

corruption order grabs is common place gadhafi was bitter opponent all right it was ahmed groups whatever his faults and they now have the ability to use the chaos in libya to provide the basis the first effects where immediate a hostage crisis in algeria said to be in retaliation for the french offensive in mali has already claimed the lives of dozens of civilians taken captive i'm frightened of terrorism but this is always been a problem for france whether it's chirac or sarkozy. i'm french i was born here and live here my culture is french but my origins are there and if i was there i wouldn't like another country telling me what to do. you know we're scared of anything that threatens us. france's global allies are showing signs of being sucked into the mali conflict british prime minister david cameron has already acknowledged that battling radical insurgency in the region could take decades

rather than months and all this so that france can remedy the knock on effects from its libyan intervention. r t paris. well earlier i spoke with former u.k. ambassador to algeria graham ham graham ham handed i should say who says the killing of several british hostages isn't enough to dissuade london from helping the french intervention to united kingdom will continue to support the french intervention i imagine that the british government will also want to support our friends in algeria in any way that they might ask us to. david cameron has said that the fight against islamic terrorists in north africa could take decades can britain really afford to get involved like they did in afghanistan which i should mention of course started out with george bush saying that we would be in and out. well politicians turned always to say we'll be in and then we'll be seeing mr

cameron knows that this will take time i don't imagine that he is thinking of committing british ground troops to north africa but there's a lot we can do in terms of intelligence technology logistics i think it does have to be done the question really is how can we afford not to. there was the thought that france went in because of possible uranium resources there what is britain's interests than. well i think britain's interest is in having stability on the on the if you like the southern florida flank of nato just across the mediterranean from from western europe. i don't accept these conspiracy theories about minerals i think it's really about knowing that we have we have stable neighbors stable neighbors but at the same time britain openly backs rebels who are known to have sort of attachments to al qaeda and other is islamist groups there so where

then is the consistency. sort of what rebel groups of those in syria. yes yes well if i say reading anything it was more of a geo political in terms of security and not resources so where then why yes in syria no in syria and mali well i think it's a different story this is not. an al-qaeda linked islam the stop arising in syria it's all been repeated who want a different life they want to be rid of a tyrant. outside in charge of them and this will solve itself apparently without any intervention from the outside i think the story in mali is completely different this is foreign intervention by the al-qaeda linked terrorists

themselves this is not on just mali i'm striving to change the government. well for more on this story we can now talk live with john laughlin the director of studies institute to money and cooperation in paris thanks for being with us john perceptor noone how would you evaluate the success of the algerian operation. well i think you know obviously on the face of it it was it was a success but i mean we need to look deeper do we need to. what is the link between the algerian secret services and the islamist rebels that we are now fighting what is the link between the algerian secret services and washington. there are those who think and i find the argument persuasive that these events including the of the what's going on in my early come under the category of what we call false flag operations in other words things are stirred up in such a way that intervention is as it were required and that's the situation we're now

in france and britain and other countries are sending troops into mali and so we have yet another western intervention yet more troops on the ground yet more neocolonialism and at the same time john what about syria because i spoke yeah you probably heard to the former ambassador to algeria he seems to think they're very different situations what do you think about that he seems to think that that mali and algeria have groups of al-qaeda linked terrorists you know destroying any kind of stability there in that honest civilians out on the streets in syria how do you think that well i think like your viewers i greatly enjoyed the ambassador's. discomfiture when you put him that question i mean he doesn't have an answer and the western governments do not have an answer to the question of it which is to say why do we support islamic or islamist rebels in syria and yet send troops into

crush islam missed rebels in mali there's a. way of squaring the circle these are simply double standards for the by the same token why did we support last year the succession of south sudan but we suddenly send in troops to prevent the secession of north mali these are political decision we are taking political decisions on the basis of our political vision and our friends and enemies and that's the reason why we do one thing in syria and the other thing in mali and as for encouraging stability i mean that really does take the cookie to say that you know we have practically the whole of the middle east including north africa in turmoil we have supported we the west have supported the great uprisings of the arab spring only to find that they the regimes they have produced have an important islamic element. and of course all this comes against the background as you know of the repression in algeria which has been going on for

fifteen or twenty years we all remember that in the early ninety's the islamists there won the election and the situation was averted only by having a millet tree or effectively military rule in algeria these are conundrums which the west has not solved and is not solving it is on the contrary making matters worse ok and now now their commander that i want to i want to talk about while why you brought it up is resources because i put that question to the ambassador and he seemed to think that it was a conspiracy theory that this is any kind of resource grabbing mission it's obviously no secret that africa is full of resources and it's no secret that the west in general has been moving to increase its control over africa and now for many years for the last decade one of the instruments by the way for this control is the international criminal court which issued an indictment against the rebels

in mali. only days after the french announced they were sending troops there to fight them the international criminal court which is supposed to be a world court has in fact only ever opened investigations into situations in africa the americans meanwhile have plans for the military as it were domination of africa they've drawn up plan is for africa to be put under a new section of the pentago done to be controlled in the way so whether it there is a specific short term goal of gaining control of natural resources i cannot say are not well enough informed to know that but i think we can identify here a general trend of intervention in africa of increased western including american intervention in africa which this latest thing is only this latest venture in mali is only the latest example and of course the non intervention in places that lack natural resources to say john marquand joining us live from paris we have broadband

thanks for that analysis thank you. german chancellor angela merkel's coalition has suffered a blow ahead of the parliamentary election later this year they've been defeated in a key regional vote losing one seat in the lower saxony and the disappointing result potentially puts merkel in a vulnerable position ahead of september's general election in which she seeks to win a third term in office parties peter oliver reports on the fragile support for the german leader both at home and abroad. it's the thirteenth setback in local elections that angle merkel's christian democrat party and their coalition partners the free democrats have suffered it's also more importantly the fifth the fifth state government which they've lost to the social democrats since two thousand and nine this vote in lower saxony which is the fourth most populous state in germany it seemed very much as a bellwether of opinion and it was incredibly tight well it was by one seat and

what it does mean though even by the smallest of margins the social democrats well they smell blood heading into the general election their candidate for the chancellorship steinbrück said this well this shows that a change of government power is possible this year what's interesting when you look at this particular particular local election is the eurozone debt crisis really didn't come into it this was a local election where people were voting on local issues now it's in that area where mrs merkel is starting to show some weaknesses as it were and her christian democratic party and their coalition partners but she still has this personal appeal as the leader because of what she's done for the eurozone crisis but of course that isn't mirrored when you look around the rest of europe particularly in countries like greece where we've seen her burned in effigy and even compared to adult hitler because the greek people they see angela merkel as the main person

behind the austerity that they're having to live through so her popularity abroad personally isn't particularly great when it comes to the eurozone crisis however germans are happy with the way that she's managed this crisis and managed germany's economy throughout it but as i say it's going to come down to whether she can convince the german people that she's the right person to manage german interests at home as well as those abroad whether she can win not third term towards the end of this year. well across the atlantic another leader is getting ready to set out his second term stall with barack obama to deliver a speech on the next four years of his presidency will look at whether he can live up to his promises. there are twelve cities in the united states in which half of the people with hiv aids lives with. over sixty percent of. this with

this is a problem that frankly is substantially preventable it was like the big elephant in the room and nobody wanted to talk about they were really good public health campaigns that people were really focused on this problem you certainly should be able to. see a lot less human suffering. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations rule the day. old. technology innovation. developments from

around russia. the future coverage. welcome back you're watching r t live from moscow with me and he said now a good times that goldman sachs staff at the investment giant are reported to be getting a significant salary boost but a lot of that money has been made on the back of surging food prices which are leaving many around the world starving i.d.s. alexei yourself he has been looking into this story alexei tell us how does this affect food prices per se in africa well this debate has been going on for many years now but this latest controversy is definitely making this discussion even more fueled now the employees of goldman sachs investment bank are in for some happy times their salaries have reportedly been raised and almost half a million dollars worth of annual bonuses are to be paid out all because in twenty

two of the company made about four hundred million dollars from investing its clients' money in a range of products known as soft commodities such as we don't maize to coffee and sugar but what's good for bankers is damaging the global food situation say experts and many claim major investment players are contributing to a global food emergency the united nations warned that the world could be on the brink of a major hunger crisis this year after poor harvests in the united states and ukraine food prices already surged last summer with cereals hitting a record high in september last year food cost sixteen percent higher than in twenty ten and more than twice as expensive as a decade ago even after adjusting for inflation with almost a billion people already starving such a forecast could make things catastrophic worse and the latest controversy with goldman sachs has once again reignited the debate on what actually stands behind the hike in food prices organizations like food watch say they are not the only ones financial players around the world bear a large part of blame by investing astronomical sums of money into food stuffs and

speculating on the prices to make big profits in the last three years alone speculators have poured in as an extra. hundred billion u.s. dollars into the sector and that is expected of driving prices even higher investment and central banks deny this saying futures trading is important for farmers and their bets have no effect yet the prices. bear scant resemblance to the natural growth in demand for food moreover there are already creating grounds for instability sparking protests and demonstrations for instance in several african countries including working faster in senegal bakers went on strike recently because of an eighty percent increase in the price of wheat so if this trend continues people will be unable to afford basic staple foods and if further harvest suffer too it's not hard to imagine the consequences for the world's hungry and i thank you very much for breaking that down for us. to israel now where a general election is looming and polls there predict will be little change the

makeup of the country's parliament forecaster promising the return of prime minister benjamin netanyahu is right wing likud party and are leaving many voters apathetic and disillusioned artie's polis leader reports. the countdown has begun but instead of scanning the papers to brush up on who's saying what in the final hours before his way he's head to the polls. is searching for an apartment the twenty eight year old is desperate to move out of his parents' home but times are tough and he blames the government right i'm not going to vote i see who are the candidates and there is no one standing who represents me or who can change the general mood in the country with. the recent political justing that's all candidates move from one party to another induced even more pessimism in people like musharraf who have lost trust in israeli politicians the union between bibi netanyahu and his foreign minister avigdor lieberman in to be them in government the return of sydney former opposition leader back into the fray just

a few months after announcing her time and only frustrated and already election where we public many israelis don't believe that the present politicians and parties. have any really new solutions to the big problems facing israel create security peace spirit economic issues. but among all the uncertainty one thing is certain for the disenchanted voters and it can work and i also feel like the outcome is pre-determined everyone knows not to know who is going to win for them or the apathy based on the belief that netanyahu will almost certainly when has led expects to worry about the state of his way to democracy. there are some populations designing these really society if you take a certain sort of the ultra orthodox the presenters that turns out to vote is very high it's above eighty on the other hand when you look at the middle class the youth and the arabs the presenters is around sixty. and those figures only help

netanyahu and his allies of course there are parties who are ready to oppose the government's policies one of their merits boasts that a vote for them is a secure vote against netanyahu and a leadership that will destroy israel first of all are is a lation the war will continue. there will be no worse solution to the palestinian problem and the economic and social gaps between rich and poor who will get to march why they're in deeper but marriage is expected to win only around five percent of the votes in a record field of fifty four parties that are running in these elections netanyahu is party is expected to get only about a quarter of the seats in the parliament but with other political forces being shattered into rival factions this is still going to be enough for him to continue in power the coalition effort on yahoo is expected to build would have a very slim majority but it would still give him the mandate he needs to map out this country's next four years but the paradox of the selection is that the

candidate say to win is not particularly liked by most of the country policia r.t. to level of. drug obama is officially at the helm of the us government for another four years after being sworn in at the white house all eyes will be on the american president later monday when he outlines his second term plans in his inaugural speech obama's first four years so he wasn't he railed by failing to keep some of his pledges and each to can question if it's a trend that's here to stay. it's generally thought that his second term six u.s. president on walks those handcuffs that kept them from doing great things in their first term because they had to think about getting reelected all the time in the last four years we've heard many times president obama's hands are tied on this issue word that issue suppose this election has on tied his hands we don't have a crystal ball to tell you what he's going to do with those three presidential hands but we may already see signs of what is to come president obama steps into

his second term carrying a heavy load of promises along with the. threat of another devastating war in the middle east for four years president obama pushed to a great extent by israel as war with iran i will take no options off the tape and what i say is this some believe the appointment of chuck hagel as defense secretary who is known to have been against a strike on iran may be a sign that the new obama administration will be less warmongering towards the word but two of the country's leading middle east experts orange convinced i would bet a certain amount of money we will hear the words all options are on the table come out of his come out of his mouth in addition to the point that we have the appointment of john brennan at the cia who i think is someone who the israelis are just fine with who will continue many of the covert programs of course or drone program but many of the covert programs that would be under his under his authority

at the cia that will be very much to israel's liking that will serve to undermine any attempt possibilities for. coming to terms of the islamic republic of iran john brennan has been in charge of president obama's targeted assassinations program is a point of push the notorious war on terror in a different perspective and shows that it's far from over they want wars that will not redound against them at home politically so they don't want any more body bags they don't want more american troops. killed to the extent they want to prevent that they want to have all the soldiers sitting in alexandria virginia or los angeles or whatever and running the brony that are killing people whether it's afghanistan or yemen or iran or you know were else however over the next four years the administration's reach will extend far beyond the middle east as it is said to continue its pivot to asia as well as building a missile shield provocatively close to russia's borders last year in

a hot mike moment president obama told russia's made that event if that in his second term he'd be more flexible to discuss moscow concerns. but it could turn out to be flexibility to words only rather than action believe russia is still at it we opposed to it still sees it as we're just going to go ahead. while president obama may have more control over foreign policy domestically there is a greater chance of his agenda getting bogged down in congress like gun control and the executive orders are useless and legislative proposals and i suspect will not pass in this country i don't think it's in the offing and he were in the near future because we are a culture that is very deeply. in love with our guns in the last four years congress more than was attempted to sabotage the president on key

economic issues including reaching a last minute deal as the country teetered on the edge of fiscal cliff presidents who have trouble with congress like to do international things because they have to worry about congress much less the president's actions so far have shown little possibility that in the next four years he will be adding more flexible on major foreign policy issues as far as is the mess that could genda many doubt whether he's never ending battle with congress will allow him to move significantly beyond inspiring speeches in washington i'm kind of checking. tear ups are main news back here in our t. up next a special report on aids in america. georgian

president mikheil saakashvili is military police have been accused by prosecutors of using a very unusual weapon to control members of the government a weapon so unusual that history's great villains wouldn't even touch it that weapon was almost sexuality the georgian prosecutor's office claims a network of gay spies was set up to seduce certain politicians in order to surveil them and blackmail them the gay spies would tempt men in the government into going back to their apartments which were filled with hidden cameras and microphones to record information and create a not safe for work video to be used to put pressure on these officials this is truly one of the most unique and kind of gross weapons of political intrigue i've ever heard of i mean how many men in georgia politics could possibly fall into the spy trap you know if he actually did implement this scheme and it actually worked than machiavelli and von bismarck could have a thing or two to learn from president saakashvili but that's just my opinion.

little. at the start this strange new disease affecting healthy young americans looks like this a period between the first outbreak of aids summer nine hundred eighty one and i nine hundred eighty five not only were people coming down was aids and dying and so forth but nobody knew who had it or who didn't now more than thirty years since its arrival the face of aids looks like this but the social stigma of this disease lingers persons get educated but in the back of their mind h.i.v. may still be a little dirty secret the be.